Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

The car closest to the building is a 1938 LaSalle. The lower headlights help to differentiate it from the 1937 models, but it is the unique trim in 1938 that helps to conclude that it is not a Cadillac. A comparison photo is below.

Sales of LaSalles dropped dramatically because or the 1938 recession. In 1937 LaSalle had its best year selling 32,005, but in 1938 only 15,575 were sold.

It appears that the dealership building is still there on the SW corner of North Cahuenga and Selma Avenue. The brickwork still visible matches the original as does the three-windowed front of the building. Also, at far right in the original image, the stacked-block (lacking a better term) corner of the building across Selma still exists on the building there today.

That first car on the left appears to be a LaSalle. That GM Brand was discontinued in 1940. Alfred P Sloan, the GM leader, believed he was missing a price point between, I'm guessing, the Oldsmobile and the Cadillac. It was first produced in 1927. It was not too long ago that GM also ditched Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Hummer and Saturn in order to stay afloat from the deluge created by the U.S. Market's acceptance of foreign automotive brands. The weakened economy didn't help either.

Soon after Pearl Harbor, one of Britain's correspondents in the States, a young Alistair Cooke, embarked on a nationwide voyage to see how the war, its shortages, and mobilization affected ordinary Americans. In Los Angeles, he needed a new car, to replace one sold earlier in the trip. "The salesman who finally sold me was in the state of high excitement for forty-eight hours after hearing that a visitor wanted to buy a car for no other reason than to drive around the country. Throughout the subsequent negotiations, he regarded me a an amiable madman. His storeroom was a funeral parlor, the cars lined up there like so many coffins. He admitted stoically that he saw no future for himself unless he went into the Army. About once a month somebody would come in on the pretense of wanting to buy a car and then sneak around prodding the tires and not even bother to look at the engine. These were pestiferous middlemen looking for cars with good rubber and making heavy profits on the immediate resale." (Cooke, "The American Home Front: 1941-1942," p. 152 (published, finally, in 2006).)

I remember as a kid in the 1950s-60s car dealers in my town had strings of seemingly hundreds of those clear light bulbs hanging from wires spanning over their car lots. It must of been a big expense and a lot of maintenance keeping all those bulbs lit but boy at night they sure looked pretty reflecting off the shiny paint of the new cars beneath. And back then cars came in much more vivid colors than the monotonous pastel colors of today.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.